Trump To Government: Don't Publish the Truth If It Makes Me Look Bad
by tristero
Call it the ostrich strategy:
It's easy to reach for metaphors to describe the war in Afghanistan — quagmire, money pit, a boulder that must be rolled up the Hindu Kush for eternity.
John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told The Times this month that a recent decision by the Trump administration to stop releasing important metrics about the war — the size of the Taliban, for instance, or how many provinces they control — is akin to “turning off the scoreboard at a football game and saying scoring a touchdown or field goal isn’t important.”
Put another way, the American people are being kept more in the dark about the dismal state of the United States’ longest-running war, now in its 18th year...
In the latest report, in addition to the updates not provided to the inspector general on the number of districts and people living under Taliban control, the following metrics were classified or otherwise kept from the public eye: the number of casualties suffered by Afghan security forces; performance assessments of the Afghan Army, police and other security organizations; all but general information about the operational readiness of the security forces; the number and readiness of the elite Special Mission Wing of the Afghan Air Force; and reports on the progress of anticorruption efforts by the Ministry of the Interior.
My guess is the same stunt is being done with at least some economics statistics, too.